


the five-thirty urge

by Ashling



Category: Original Work
Genre: Getting Married So You Can't Testify Against Each Other in Court, M/M, Marriage, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:15:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22344700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/pseuds/Ashling
Summary: Every day, at around five-thirty in the afternoon, I am gripped by the sudden and terrible desire to ask my husband for a divorce.A love story.
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Comments: 10
Kudos: 35
Collections: Return to the Iron Triangle - January 2020





	the five-thirty urge

**Author's Note:**

  * For [firstlovelatespring](https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstlovelatespring/gifts).



Every day, at around five-thirty in the afternoon, I am gripped by the sudden and terrible desire to ask my husband for a divorce.

I’ll be standing on the train, swaying gently in a forest of sweaty strangers and breathing only through my mouth so I don’t have to smell any of them, and anticipation will rise, like a kind of thickness in the air that makes merely existing seem difficult. By the time I get off at my stop and unchain my bicycle from its hiding place, I’ll have moved past the debating phase and on to the careful speechwriting. Not today, I reassure myself, not this week, but I am going to do it, and so I’ll have to know what to say…

I always know what to say, of course. It’s never the same thing in words, but the thrust of it never changes.

By the time I hang my bike up in the garage, there will be pit stains on my oxford and tension building in my neck and my hands and I’ll have myself convinced that I can take that first step, mention to him that maybe we should sit down on Friday night and have a talk, but then the door will open, he’ll be looking down at me, and my mind will go blank.

It doesn’t matter whether he’s grinning at me like a child, excited to show me what wild concoction he’s trying for dinner that night, or pinch-faced and exhausted from work, or merely friendly, or even smiling in that gentle dangerous way he can get once in a blue moon. It really doesn’t matter. I’ll feel his eyes like a touch—and then I’ll lose any plans I had, any script, however carefully written—and then I’ll be up on the stoop, face upturned for the agreed-upon kiss. Always chaste, always his right hand cupping my left cheek, callused and warm.

If that wasn’t enough, the next few steps into our house are: the curtains with the pattern of tiny pineapples that my sister mocks endlessly as chintzy, which I secretly adore. The two blue china cats that we found in a neighborhood garage sale, curled up next to each other on the carpet, eternally watchful and eternally serene. Every single cookbook stacked up beside the countertop, because we still haven’t found a better place to put them, stuffed with Post-It notes of my husband’s enthusiastic scrawl. It’s a life I could lose. I never had that before. 

And it’s so easy, then, to let all my worries fall away. He sweeps me into himself, into the the same ease that he’s always carried with him through offices and hospitals and police stations, bone-deep blithe confidence that you’d have to see to believe, and I find myself wholly absorbed by whatever he’s interested in that day: the history of Amalfi lemons, the right way to gut a freshwater trout, anything and everything that can light up his eyes. 

In the morning, though, I wake up and he’s gone to work and I remember how many days there are left. We’ve never discussed it, which I’m hoping gives him the impression that I’ve forgotten all about it, but I know it’s the kind of thing that’s impossible to forget. He must know that it all ends in the spring, even if he hasn’t got the date memorized, like I have, April the twenty-seventh. The statute of limitations used to seem like an open window to me, letting in air from the outside, keeping the both of us from being stifled, but now, it sits like predatory creature at the foot of our bed, watching me remember. As I burn my tongue with coffee, I can see the kitchen dissolving around me, our things disassembled and divided. I once thought we could each take one of the china cats, but now it seems cruel to split them up. He can have them. He can have it all.

If I tell him this, if I’m the first one to bring it up, then perhaps I can get through the conversation gracefully. I know for certain that if he were to do it, one of these days—if he were to say, out of the blue, “We’ve had a good run, haven’t we?” probably with another one of those fond and terrifying smiles—I will, within the next ten minutes, be crying. I’ve never been good with tense conversations.

We’ve been so happy together (I know he has been happy, I know it, even though he couldn’t have nearly anything in life that he once wanted, it’s in his nature, and I’ve been as good to him as I can, better than I ever knew I was capable of) that it seems such a shame now to end it in a humiliation of confessions and all that. If I can just have a script ready, and carry it out, the inevitable hammer might come down a little more gently. There is still, technically, a lot to look forward to, a lot to be grateful for. We won’t go to prison. We’ve got our health, if not exactly our youth. We could still be friends, I think, if I could only work up the courage to ask him.

Maybe tomorrow.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] the five-thirty urge](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23695555) by [ffg_podfics (flowersforgraves)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowersforgraves/pseuds/ffg_podfics)




End file.
